Web tour: Boston Globe: The meaning is the metaphor in thought and design

I’m fascinated by the mind/body connection. This may be, in part, because I’m an architect. I believe that shaping spaces, which our bodies inhabit, can shape the minds inhabiting them, and vice versa. So I often find Drake Bennett’s writing about cognitive and behavioral science in the Ideas Section of the Globe intriguing.

This week Bennett wrote about thinking literally. Bennett reports that cognitive scientists are studying how commonly understood metaphors are the “keys to the structure of thought”. When we describe someone as warm, a situation as heavy, a goal as lofty, or a problem as hard, we are using what scientists call “primary metaphors”. These they believe are more than communication tools but “markers of the roots of thought itself”. Scientists are taking metaphors literally. According to Bennett, "without our body's instinctive sense for temperature -- or position, texture, size, shape, or weight -- abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us".

To study their theory, scientists are conducting experiments “altering one side of the metaphorical equation to show how it changes the other”. Give folks warm cups of coffee; then ask them to assess a person described to them, and they find that person to be warm. Give some other folks iced coffee; ask them to assess a person described to them, and they find that person to be cold. O.K., it's a little more complicated than that, but, yikes. Are we really that literal and that suggestible? Looks like it.  Bennett writes that “metaphors reveal the extent to which we think with our bodies”.

This would suggest that subtle changes in our environments: how soft, hard, dark, light, smooth, or rough they are would influence how soft, hard, dark, light, smooth, or rough we feel. It’s always fun when common sense prevails. 

Take a look at other House Enthusiast posts (here and here) which also reference Drake Bennett’s writing for Ideas.
 
by Katie Hutchison for House Enthusiast

Web tour: Things That Inspire: Heads up

Click on this photo to see it in the KHS photo note cards/prints gallery.Surf the web this week, and you’ll find the House Enthusiast Primer on the third dimension referenced at Things That Inspire. Using abundant interior images, Things That Inspire translates the concepts described in the House Enthusiast Primer to interiors via photos illustrating a range of spatial depths and heights in well-appointed homes. Both webposts invite readers to train their eyes on a dimension vital to shaping our experience. Whether the third dimension is expressed overhead, in a framed view corridor, on a textured surface, by an articulated stair, or with a spatial illusion, our environments are richer for having explored it.

by Katie Hutchison for House Enthusiast

Web tour: The Glass House: Modern Homes Survey

The Amato House in New Canaan, Conn. designed by James Evans c. 1966It always sounds curious to talk about preservation and Modernism in one breath, but the two are fast becoming linked as time marches forward, leaving the mid-century Modernism movement farther and farther in our past.  In an effort to protect mid-century Modern houses for future preservation The Philip Johnson Glass House (a National Trust Historic Site in New Canaan, Conn.) has created a “narrative survey of 91 existing modern homes in New Canaan” designed by masters of the era like Marcel Breuer, Eliot Noyes, and John Johansen, as well as a second generation of Modernists.  Following the lead of DoCoMoMo (the international organization for the Documentation and Conservation of buildings, sites and neighborhoods of the Modern Movement), the Glass House hopes that the Modern Homes Survey will provide “criteria for significance,” rendering the featured houses preservation worthy.  The digital version of the Survey is accessible online for free.  It tells an interesting tale of a bucolic region surprisingly populated by the works of celebrated Modernists. 

I wrote about my visit to the Glass House here.

by Katie Hutchison for House Enthusiast